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Originally posted here by MsMittens Ya. And so? I don't understand what's so special about them when there are OC12 lines out there (I nearly went working for a company that had those).

For those unaware:

T-3 = up to 45 Mbps
OC12 = 622 Mbps

Ya. And so? OC48 - 2.5 gigabits per seconds and OC192 - 9.6 Gb/S, running today. An OC192 is equivalent to over 6,200 T1's, or over 200 T3's. WAN speed is no longer an issue. If you have the money to pay for it ,then you have the speed to supply it.

Hence, the new saying...."Who needs QoS when you have bandwidth."

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
- Samuel Johnson

OC48 - 2.5 gigabits per seconds and OC192 - 9.6 Gb/S, running today. An OC192 is equivalent to over 6,200 T1's, or over 200 T3's. WAN speed is no longer an issue. If you have the money to pay for it ,then you have the speed to supply it.

Ya. I couldn't remember how far the numbers went. Last time I had checked it was around OC12 as being the highest. That said, if the gov't has a T6, then whoopie. I'd bet the NSA is closer to an OC192 or higher. How else would something like Eschelon/Carnivore work?

Originally posted here by MsMittens Ya. I couldn't remember how far the numbers went. Last time I had checked it was around OC12 as being the highest. That said, if the gov't has a T6, then whoopie. I'd bet the NSA is closer to an OC192 or higher. How else would something like Eschelon/Carnivore work?

Even at theoretical speeds they'd have to have something far faster than that to feed Carnivore.

Has anyone ever mirrored a gig port on a 100Mbs port? *Boom* crash the switch or the port, no doubt. To even view the amount of info runnning everywhere at once they'd better have something bigger than OC192, like, maybe, 10 times that speed....

The issue isn't bandwidth, it's desire. How badly do they want to scan your emails to Grandma? They don't. They don't really care. They want to know info that makes them look bad or will potentially make them look bad. Carnivore is a theory, only. In practice it would make no sense.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
- Samuel Johnson

A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as ''Mudhen'' once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone.

The others took him at his word, because Mudhen worked at the Puzzle Palace -- the nickname of the U.S. National Security Agency facility at Fort Meade, Md., which houses the world's most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and anti-terrorism systems.

It was these systems, plus an army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists, that may have pulled in the first piece of evidence that led Canadian authorities to arrest an Ottawa man on terrorism charges last week.

Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community, The Sunday Times reported that an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.

The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest.

"That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said.

Officials at the NSA could not be reached for comment. But U.S. authorities are uniquely positioned to monitor international Internet and telecommunications traffic because many of the world's international gateways are located in their country. And once that electronic traffic touches an American computer -- an e-mail message, a request for a website or an Internet-based phone call, for instance -- it is routinely monitored by NSA spies.

"Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws, and the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic," said Mr. Farber, who has also been a technical adviser to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

That's what happened in February, when NSA officers at Fort Meade intercepted a message between correspondents in Britain and Pakistan, The Sunday Times reported. The contents of that message have not been revealed, but are significant enough that dozens of intelligence officials were mobilized in Britain, Canada and the United States.

The intelligence officers at Fort Meade rely on a sophisticated suite of supercomputers and telecommunications equipment to analyze millions of messages and phone calls each day, looking for certain keywords or traffic patterns.

Internet traffic is chopped up into small chunks called packets, and each individual package is then routed over the Internet, to be reassembled at the recipient's end. The packet is wrapped in what computer scientists sometimes refer to as the envelope. And just as the exterior of a regular piece of mail contains important addressing information, so does the envelope of a digitized packet. These bits of information are called headers, and they can be valuable to investigators as well.

Headers typically contain generic descriptions of the packet's contents, in order to let computers make better decisions about how to route the packet through the Internet. E-mail traffic gets a lower priority than Internet video traffic, for instance.

Headers also pick up the numeric or Internet Protocol (IP) address of all the computers a packet touches as it travels from its originating machine all the way to its destination. Every computerized device connected to the Internet has its own unique IP number.

Investigators could program their supercomputers to flag packets of information that met certain criteria, such as a certain IP number, a certain traffic pattern or a certain kind of content. As soon as a packet is flagged, investigators would apply for warrants to assemble the packets and read the messages' contents.

You might also want to find the book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford (he wrote The Puzzle Palace, which is referenced above). Published in 2002 it seems to have some indication that Echelon does in fact exist.

Echelon, for thoes of you that arnt super current on ultra secret government technology, is a supposed computer system that listens to phone conversations and picks out certain words analyses the conversation and then prints it out in a readable form for experts to go throug and do a risk analysis. Not sure if its global or just state side...anyone know? Anyways, were all gonna get tracked down and have our memory erased now. *looks behind* gotta go.

OC is the optical carrier. It's the limit of how smart mankind is at devising ways to make a laser blink really fast in a multitude of colors to represent data transfer via a Fiber of light. The limitation has been breached and is always being breached even as OC levels such as 12 and forward present themselves in the market place. It's the same fiber but if you replace a card worth millions you can instantly go from OC 12 to say OC 192. Of course a few more million would be spent on equipment to break that down into T3s and then T1s, DS levels etc.

All are very common in telecommunications infrastructure. The weak link in modern encryption is the "person" holding the key and physical access to the circuit cards.

Eschelon is much higher than carnivore Ms. Mittens, at least in the fictional world. The NSA doesn't care much about any of us, not even when you mention key words like Kill the president, destroy the white house. Wrong office. NSA operates in a compartmentalized world, and if anyone hears about it. It's old and already replaced.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.